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Spotify’s new study spells good news for advertising and the UK economy

January 7, 2014

As Spotify celebrates its fifth year, it’s worth remembering that the company launched at the height of the financial crisis and has only existed when the global economy has been ‘bumping along the bottom’.

Put another way, for all of our recent success, the company has not sold adverts during the good times. In this study, we test the often-assumed ‘first to suffer, first to recover’ relationship between advertising and the economy, to provide:

Hard evidence of this causal relationship, with data suggesting advertising is more strongly linked to investment and consumption than GDP.

New insights on the performance of four big marcomms groups in the UK, providing further evidence that the recovery is underway.

Better tools for measuring volume and value to help understand the performance of advertising in a digital age.

Will Page, Director of Economics at Spotify said: “As the economy enters a recovery, this study draws attention to the productivity of advertising. With Spotify targeting ads by age, sex, genre, location and time of day, we no longer need to assume – as John Wanamaker famously remarked – that half of the money spent on advertising is wasted.”

Chris Maples, European VP of Spotify said: “By innovating through the downturn, we are perfectly placed to capitalise on the recovery, and expand the opportunities facing the digital advertising market in the future.”